Abstract:

In last 30 years the number of books and educational resources covering wide topics of engineering published in Polish language have been declining dramatically. Lack of financing and profit-oriented approach of publishing houses caused the reduction of useful, peer-reviewed handbooks on the market. Moreover, such approach leads to price skyrocketing and makes many books unavailable for individual students or in bigger quantities for public or university libraries.

Over time, we notice the rising importance of knowledge resources available online and free of charge. Such resources, very often are of disputable reputation, come from illegal sources, cover only shallow part of knowledge or are misleading. The rising importance of Internet and demand for Internet based sources of knowledge became crucial for modern society and became a no retreat situation.

Taking into account above mentioned drawbacks of publicly accessible materials, many public and private institutions founded grants for development of educational resources that covered their topics of expertise and that were addressed to general public. In recent years in Poland there were several very interesting initiatives related to open educational resources - just to mention openAGH (at AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków) or open resources of Wrocław University of Technology. Most of them covered the area of vary basic fields of study - Mathematics, Physics, Programming etc. Some of them are of very good essential and technical quality. However they do not cover more technical and advanced subjects of engineering, for which our students claim.

Centre for Open and Distance Education at Warsaw University of TechnologyTechnology is the unit established for promoting and introducing new educational technologies and providing the on distance studies.

Now it is the leader of a project entitled eSEZAM, that is devoted to creation, maintaining and sharing of educational resources from the fields of Automation, Electronics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Telecommunications. The main goal of the project is to prepare a number (>200) of educational modules covering topics from above mentioned fields of study and to create a easily accessible platform for distribution of these resources.

In our presentation we are going to discuss both educational and technical issues related to the development of the platform. We are going to show, how the prepared content is used in frames of currently held educational activity and how it becomes more and more useful for people from outside of Academia.

We are also going to present the technical capabilities of the platform and its versatility - availability for various types of content.

Keywords:

OER, open access, open resources, textbook, digital library, repository, engineering.